Donald Westlake - SH5 - Hitch Your Spaceship To A Star
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2024-11-24
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IN THE EIGHTIES, I wrote six stories about the Starship
Hopeful, all published by Playboy. I have previously mounted
four of the stories on this site, and now here is the fifth,
HITCH YOUR SPACESHIP TO A STAR, written in February 1984,
published in Playboy December 1985.
I enjoyed writing these stories, and wish I’d written more, but
no. And my moment with them is long gone. In any event, please
enjoy my HITCH, and one of these days I’ll put up the last
story in the cycle.
HITCH YOUR SPACESHIP TO A STAR
by Donald Westlake
From the beginning of Time, man has been on the move, ever outward. First he spread over his
own planet, then across the solar system, then outward to the Galaxies, all of them dotted,
speckled, and measled with the colonies of Man.
Then, one day in the year eleven thousand four hundreds and six (11, 406), an incredible
discovery was made in the Master Imperial Computer back on Earth. Nearly 500 years before, a
clerical error had erased from the computer’s memory more than 1000 colonies, all in sector
F.U.B.A.R. 3. For half a millenium, those colonies, young and struggling when last heard from,
had had no contact with the rest of humanity.
The Galaxy Patrol Interstellar Ship Hopeful, Captain Gregory Standforth commanding, was at
once dispatched to re-establish contact with the Thousand Lost Colonies and return them to the
bosom of mankind.
BREAKFAST ON THE HOPEFUL consisted of ocher juice, parabacon, toastettes, mock omelet,
papjacks, sausage, (don’t ask) and Hester’s coffee. It was called Hester’s coffee because Hester made
it and Hester drank it; the others had to draw the line somewhere.
This morning, all hands had gathered for the prelanding meal. At the head of the round table sat Captain
Standforth himself, under the glassy eyes of nearly two score defunct birds mounted on the walls, the
stuffing of which was his only true vocation. Descended from those Standforths, the ones who had so
routinely over the past seven generations covered themselves with glory in the service of the Galactic
Patrol, the captain had been compelled by both his family and destiny to enlist when his turn came, just as
the patrol had been compelled by family and history to take him, inadvertently and unhappily proving that
sometimes neither nature nor nurture may create character. Taxidermy? A Standforth? Regrettably, yes.
Gathered around, scoffing down the fabrifood, were the rest of the expendable captain’s expendable
crew, plus his lone expendable passenger, Councilman Morton Luthguster, as plump and pompous as a
pouter pigeon crossed with a blimp. The crew consisted of second-in-command Lieutenant Billy Shelby,
young and idealistic but not to awfully bright; Astrogator Pam Stokes, very bright and very beautiful but a
stranger to passion; Ensign Kybee Benson, whose encyclopedic knowledge of human societies did not
keep him from being personally antisocial; and stockily blunt Chief Engineer Hester (of the coffee)
Hanshaw, proud mistress of the engine room.
The captain wiped his lips on a toastette, then ate it. “Well,” he said to his murky band, “we’ll be landing
soon.” His mild eyes gleamed with visions of this unknown planet and the unimaginable new birds he
would soon disembowel.
Councilman Luthguster, swirling a forkful of papjack in pseudoleo, said, “What is this place we’re
coming to, Ensign Benson? What are its characteristics?”
“No one knows for sure about this one, Councilman,” the ensign told him. “The old records simply say
the colonies were a group of like-minded people whose goal was a simple life free of surprises.”
“Well, we’ll be a surprise,” the councilman said.
Councilman Luthguster said, “What’s the name of the place, Ensign Benson? I’ve noticed that the name
the colonists give their settlements frequently offers a clue to their social structure.”
“It’s called Figulus,” Ensign Benson said.
“Figulus?”
Blank looks around the table. Billy Shelby said, “Wasn’t he one of the founders of ancient Rome? Figulus
and Venus.”
“No, Billy,” said Ensign Benson.
Jim frowned skyward. “You don’t suppose they got the coordinates wrong? Landed someplace else on
Figgy?” Behind them, on the knoll where they stood, the pleasant town dreamily awaited.
“They’re dawdling over their breakfast, like as not,” Hank replied. “In fact, there they come yonder.”
“Publius Nigidius Figulus,” Ensign Benson said. “He was the most learned Roman of his age, a writer and
a statesman, died circa forty-five BC”
Billy looked sad. “Died at the circus? That’s awful.”
“Terrible,” the ensign agreed. “Figulus was most noted for his books on religion and-----”
“We’re,” Pam Stokes said, her ancestral slide rule moving like a live thing in her slender-fingered hands,
a subtle alteration simultaneously taking place in the faint aura of engine hum all about them, “here.”
Everyone jumped up to look out the view ports at Figulus, third of ten planets in orbit around the Sollike
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分类：外语学习
价格：5.9玖币
属性：15 页
大小：31KB
格式：PDF
时间：2024-11-24
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